 welcome. It's a new day and a new week here at the non-profit show and Julia and I are thrilled to have with us today Ellen Owens-Carcy joining us from the Carcy group. You might want to take a deep breath because you really want to wait before you automate which is fascinating because I always think let's just do it let's let's get on this automation train let's make that happen but instead we're going to take a deep breath we're going to get centered and really figure it what makes the most sense in regards to our automation so Ellen's been on before and we'll share a little bit more about herself in just a moment but before we pass the mic we want to remind all of our viewers and listeners around the globe who we are so Julia Patrick hello to you Julia serves as the CEO of the American non-profit academy I'm Jarrett Ransom non-profit nerd and CEO of the Raven group we are so honored to have the collective support from these amazing presenting sponsors shout out of gratitude to our friends over at Bloomerang American non-profit academy non-profit thought leader fundraising academy at national university 180 management group your part-time controller staffing boutique jmt consulting non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk these are the companies that help us to stay moving forward to our 1000th episode coming up soon actually next month we are getting closer and closer as the the day goes on but thrilled to have the support from our partners that have helped us to produce these episodes which you can find them here so go ahead and pull out that phone that you're probably also on you can scan that qr code you can still find us on the streaming broadcast as well as the podcast channels so wherever you like to binge watch binge listen you can queue us up there all right Ellen thrilled to start a monye with you because you've heard me before but friday gets all the fun so monye let's make this day fun as well but Ellen Owens car say has joined us she's owner and transformational advisor at car say group welcome back that's great to be back great to be back and yes happy monday you know ellen i i held up in the green room chatter the current issue of the chronicle of philanthropy it's all about ai and navigating through the technology um challenges and opportunities that we have and so we really thought this was a great time to get you on to kind of give us some perspective because i think as jared mentioned you know we get all like excited and and actually pressured to move forward sometimes without really even taking that deep breath and so let's start off and and have you really give us a framework here because you're saying we need to assess what our automation potential is and i can't even imagine where we start with this yeah yeah it's like you know take your deep breath inhale exhale because so much is coming at us right now with ai robotic process automation this tool that tool we got to do it today and and the reality is that things are moving so quickly that it's important for everybody just take a pause for a second and say what are we really trying to do here what are our objectives what are our goals with quote unquote automation um and embedding this into our day to day so it's really important to first say if we're going to do this what is our potential to be successful what are we trying to achieve what are our goals and objectives by automating a process and then also am i automating something that is a bad process which we're going to talk about do i really know if this is going to have the the impact that i'm going to want it to have do we have big changes on the horizon that we need to consider before we dive into this do we anticipate any structural organizational changes and then capacity do we have the capacity to take on this level of a project and you may not know that until you get into it a little bit more but understanding if your group has the capacity to take on such a big project because they can be big um is important to understand question um perhaps a curveball and i know you're you're up for all these sports analogies i'm curious does the software platform tend to be the one that nudges us for automation i get a lot of emails that'll say we now automate with x y and z platform or are you finding it's the human us that says there's got to be a simpler way where are you finding that like thought to to even initiate automation i love that question jarrett it's a cool that's a cool question yeah that's a good question yeah unfortunately i do think it's the shiny object uh that attracts us and uh most often it's hey i saw that this other group or i know this other group or other organization that is using this tool or that tool and my answer said typically is are your processes exactly the same as theirs are you trying to achieve exact same thing because it may or may not be a perfect fit it may not uh help you get to where you want to be so i think it's first you know the the idea of the potential in ideating giving your teams the opportunity to innovate and ideate about the what can be you know would be nice if we could drive that direction but unfortunately it's usually the influence yeah uh before we go on what amount of time should we dedicate to this process like how long should we all you know sit down and really look at this is this something that we can you know do in a week or two weeks or is this going to be something that we really are going to have to to give more time a lot more time for really should give way more time uh you know a lot of implementations usually they'll say anywhere from six to eight months i can tell you from experience that it's usually longer than that it depends on a lot of different factors in terms of how big you're trying to go with some sort of automation or again capacity needs and timeline so we're going to talk timeline i know in a little bit but um yeah these are not just quick things that you can implement and and hope to be successful there's probably little tools here and there that are shorter time to go live but um overall these there should be part of a bigger strategy and saying what are we trying to do right but i'm thinking what my question and i didn't probably frame it correctly is the assessment part like how long should because i know implementation can take a long time but just the assessment i mean because a lot of times we when we make assessments um it's a stumbling block right and i'm just curious like how how we should look at that time frame uh i'm going to go back to capacity because i think it's a very useful tool to say what automation aside any kind of software side let's just look at our organization today and and some people might call it maturity like how mature is our organization do we have governance structures in place do we have a good financial model do we have a good staffing model do we have systems processes policies and procedures are facilities up today let's get those basics and make sure where we're at and understand where we're at today from a capacity and then say what are the opportunities what are those opportunities and build up from there so the assessment process i would say you know you're you're going to get more out of it the more time you invest into that assessment process and who should be part of that conversation that's a great question some i i've had this experience where it's like oh we're going to have these select people be a part of the process and i think it's a myth because the broader that you go initially in the assessment phase and then you can narrow it down because you want to tie up everybody's time and meetings and conversations but getting a perspective abroad range not only internally but perhaps externally and voice of the customer we were talking about that in the green room but getting the voice of the customer your clients your donors maybe getting some perspectives from them will be super helpful in terms of understanding what you what gaps need to be addressed wow it seems like quite quite the overhaul we're looking to do let's spin to the definition like how do we define as well as document these efficient and i feel like that's the keyword efficient processes because clearly we don't want to make more garbly loop out of out of a process exactly you can automate bad process yeah so yeah automation tool and it's a bad process you're going to get bad automation so uh yeah this is my favorite part because my approach is to work with organizations by literally getting a big room and going old school with sticky notes and flip charts and markers and having people move around and actually walk through the process and i and the the idea is that number one i think it's extremely beneficial to have someone facilitate these conversations who is not aware of the process when i go in and work with an organization i am not afraid to ask questions if it's not clear to me i will ask it this is not clear to me you need to be clear and very specific in your process the other thing i find is when you have teams or cross functional teams working through a process and we're sticking sticky notes and say okay where does it start what's the next step sometimes what you'll find is that three people have differing opinions of what really is the next step and and that's not a bad thing it's a good thing to uncover because that may help you discover where some of those pain points or bottlenecks are occurring and so as you map out the process with all of these sticky notes to take a step back and go wow there's a lot of steps in our process where do we have overlaps redundancy where do we have parallel work lines happening and starting to have conversations and that happened recently with a client where as i had a cross functional team i realized that the three groups within that team were doing the exact same thing exactly and i was like their potential is to collapse these into a centralized function so that you don't have three teams doing exactly the same thing now sure there's always challenges there's always things you have to adjust but to ask the question and to point it out can be very helpful from a different perspective what was their response to that we're we're dumbfounded i mean how how did they take that aha moment if you will yeah they they at first were like oh we never thought about it that way because they're so busy doing what they need to do and hearing what some of their pain points were and i was like well i can see why you have that pain point now because you're so tied up each of you you're not getting your economy of scale by centralizing this function in a central group and so their response was the immediate response to change as it often is is like oh wait but that means trickle down effect change and i was like but the trade-off if you do this it can be just monumental and give you back time yes it was it was kind of very eye-opening for them to see it on paper well i have to say i found found it eye-opening because i got to be a part of this process with you ellen uh working with a client a mutual client of ours to see literally old school pen to paper post-it notes index cards on the wall multiple departments involved um so many aha moments came from that as well as a lot of you know as one of our guests previously called it the scooby-doo where like your head just cocks and you're like what it's just so eye-opening which i think like one of the big ahas from that uh that i got to be a part of was really to understand where the data was coming from and because we pulled in multiple people we were able to bring in different data points so help us to understand in regards to automation why it's important to understand where the data is truly coming from uh so with any of these platforms automation ai it's all about the data i mean it relies on data to come into the system to be processed and to be put out into another form and so one thing that i have also found to be true is that um for a variety of different reasons organizations are tending to store data into multiple places number one this duplication of data sources and there's no single source of truth and it's important to get to a single source of truth where the data is the correct data and then these systems pull from those that that um source of data and so when we do process mapping oftentimes i'll ask about well where do these data points come from where what system currently feeds into this process or connects to this process and so that can also give an indication and start in that assessment process understanding what do we really what do we need in terms of a tool or a platform and what kind of data are we going to store there the other thing is junk in junk out right so if your data is bad uh you either the system will not automate it properly or you'll have gaps uh perhaps and one of the examples that i would give are something as simple as the format for date of birth some people in some countries and cultures put in dates of birth with month then day then year versus day then month then year um and so different formats uh different ways and so if you don't understand or it's not very specific or it's not clean the data's not clean putting that back into an automation process could break the process or at least not provide you the results you were looking for amazing yeah it just up ends things so um in such a tremendous way you know Jared mentioned something in the green room and and I think this is a really interesting segue to how do you know where you're going and what you're going to need you know a lot of times we say oh we want growth we want growth we want growth but we don't really know what that's going to do we just think of of the revenue and that's great and that's going to allow us to do more programming or get you know better salaries or expand their campus whatever but we don't always understand or look at what those costs of that growth are going to be internally how do we look at this yeah so cost is a real interesting piece because as you go through the assessment process you understand what you're trying to do you get clear goals and objectives the next stage is to understand what are what are our requirements what do we really need to have out of automation in the system what do we need it to be able to do what do we need it to be able to what other systems do we need it to be able to integrate with so that the accounting system is talking to this system or a membership or a donor system they're all connected right so you get to that point and you get ready to say these are our requirements our business requirements these are the user scenarios that we're trying to achieve and then you start vetting out potential platforms and that's where you get these wonderful presentations about we can do it and i'm i'm being really that is that's what they're supposed to do right but the reality is when it comes down to cost to understand what is the payment structure what is the cost structure is it subscription or is it based on data is it based on users so if it's based on how much data or how many records understand how many records do you anticipate if it's based on users how many users actually will be using the system is there additional storage costs for for the data that's being stored asking what is your year one cost and then your three year total cost of ownership not just how much does it cost for the licenses but what is the total cost of ownership what is the total implementation cost implementation costs are usually what gets people because it's it's the software may be very attainable from a licensing perspective but you oftentimes need someone a part third party integrator systems implementation partner to come in and do that work and that can cost anywhere from 25 000 upwards to a hundred thousand dollars to do and i don't think that is often the organizations i've worked with ellen budgeted in a non-profit so i feel like this needs to be a future goal right so like if we're looking at doing this we need like when are we adding that into our budget because i don't think this is something we can say we have this pain point we want to automate we want to take the proper channels and steps to do so but we don't have 30 grand right now right so like is this a conversation that needs to happen for the next year or two years even yeah putting that if you know and i'm working with a client right now who you know fortunately for them they had been through this before so they knew they kind of had line of sight so they had planned well in advance knowing we need to allocate this money in our budget knowing that we're going to need to replace this system moving forward in the future and so um yes plan ahead for those types that when you have line of sight of something that you want to do starting to put that into the budget and understanding those implementation costs are often one-time costs so how you structure that versus you know operational versus capital versus whatever however you structure that in your budget and then understanding what is the total cost of ownership of this platform moving forward it's not just licensing usually there's sometimes maintenance fees there's sometimes support costs that you may need uh you know finding out is training involved with my implementation do we need to have people train going forward um do my other systems require updates so there's so many fine points and i continue to learn every single time i pick up pieces every single time like oh man i should have asked that question so it because things change things are constantly changing so um that's a big one the total cost of ownership and then i wanted to say too the cost not financial but understanding to the the people impacted by automation understanding how that impacts them from a change management perspective when some people hear automation they're like oh they're automating me out of a job right and it's a workforce reduction and so under helping people understand and get their minds wrapped around what you're trying to achieve with automation to elevate other people's jobs to reduce inefficiencies whatever it is but make sure you're considering the people's side of this process it reminds me of our our friend shawna oldz with bootle and he said ai is coming for your job but for the pieces of your job that you shouldn't be doing anyway yeah so i thought of that jared exactly i was thinking of that because he was like you're going to be able to do things that are a lot more interesting as opposed to just the the uh mundane and kind of that that piece that's not that's not any fun well for me as a fundraiser and we know that we have lots of fundraisers that are part of this audience if i can spend more one-on-one time with donors and less in the data entry the follow-up like how much of that could be automated with some personalization the more face time we have i think that will show a greater ROI uh in the long run so there's a there's a lot to think about um ellen before we sign off i just have to ask what if automation goes awry right like what if there's a hiccup and we're like none of this is working and we just spend all this time what should we plan as a plan be yeah actually in the in the process of the plan of implementation you should always have what we call a rollback plan what happens if something doesn't work now as part of a deployment of any kind of process or automation you usually do some kind of testing to make sure whatever we just implemented is working and somebody does data validation to make sure the data transferred over correctly and looks correct because the last thing you want to have happened and you may have experienced this where an automated email goes out and there's a bunch of gobbledygook in the email because the automation didn't happen correctly or you got there it's coming to you but it's like that's not my name so that's the last thing you want to have happen are those more public facing things that happen before you check your work so to speak um so yeah it's you need to have a rollback plan in case it doesn't work correctly but the gate is that testing that happens such great insight it sounds like you've done this a few thousand times I love it I love it yeah it's been really fun having you here I've got to ask one more question and this came in kind of through my my sense of your process you know evaluating understand what works you know looking at where you can improve understanding the cost the human costs the financial costs you know time served how long is this gonna last I mean it used to be and I don't know if it still is that when you bought a new computer whether it was like a main frame or a simple laptop that kind of the the chatter was this is only going to really be efficient between 24 and 36 months is there something in terms of a time frame that's the same way when we're looking at this that's a good question um it kind of depends on what the platform is you're talking about uh in terms of that but I I think everything has that turnover cycle and the good thing is that a lot of the platforms have built in those types of upgrades so you they can bring you along okay so be sure you like who you're working with you know but because if you like that the best thing to do is to stick with it and not make those changes and let them upgrade and that's actually a really good question to ask in your interviews of potential platforms is to say do you plan what's on your roadmap what's on your advancement roadmap so they can bring you along and um you know who's to say it may have a cost impact to the end user but at the same time it's going to be less costly to have to flip over to a whole different system so I I think that's the good thing is we become cloud-based versus things that are on-premise it's easier to do those types of updates and to be agile and making those things happen on the back end right well thank you because it's it's uh one of those things is we're is we're looking at all of this in a new and different way um we gotta be asking these questions and and I think a lot of times we start some we start on a journey and then all of a sudden these questions start popping up and it can be a little intimidating Ellen Owens Carsey owner transformational advisor that's the best title ever transform transform transformational advisor I want to have one of those in my life Carsey group um Carsey group dot com check them out give you a lot of information about different things that are going on you have a really robust um level of knowledge and in input for for all different types of nonprofits that can be looking at this and so we really appreciate you coming on today and and sharing your knowledge um because this is where we're at I mean I held up the cover of you know the Chronicle of Philanthropy but really you know the issue of AI I mean if you just open your email every day don't you find Jared it's just like everybody's talking about it is yeah it is totally inundated I mean even to the fact where my 13 year old you know is working on his homework and he's like mom do you have chat GPT and I'm like duh of course I have chat GPT you know and he's like can I use it that was like for your homework no so I mean it's it is and it's where we need to be thinking about and and what we need to be looking at so um Ellen this has been a great conversation I really really appreciate it again everybody I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself Jared our ransom CEO of the Raven Group and again we have amazing partners who really help us with these conversations and they include Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy Nonprofit Thought Leader Staffing Boutique Your Part-Time Controller 180 Management Group Fundraising Academy at National University JMT Consulting Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk um wow Jared okay this was a great way to start a Monday I feel a what I know a Monday I'm sorry a Monday a Monday yeah I think you feel like it's like you want to have this conversation yeah on a Monday well I feel like we need to have it more often because as you know we talk about this as technology advances and it's happening faster than I can any of us can even keep you know a hold of it's constantly changing and uh this is not my will house automation but I know that there are some amazing talented people like you Ellen so thank you for bringing this topic to the forefront and giving us permission to take a breath to breathe and to pause before we actually like implement automation I think that was a huge takeaway because we're so ready to run the races hit the finish line but really we need to think through this strategically absolutely thank you both yeah it was a lot of fun hey everybody as we end every episode of the non-profit show we leave you with this message and it goes like this to stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here tomorrow everyone